matt> There is a lot of that. At Defcon last year we saw the
matt> appearance of the charming shirts and stickers that say "Fuck
matt> Redhat". I was extremely annoyed, since it is complete
matt> bullshit to diss someone who is making the effort to avoid M$
matt> in any manner. Since people that don't have piercings,
matt> tatoos, and spiked blue hair were starting to use Redhat,
matt> suddenly it wasn't "cool" anymore. Fucking dumb-ass script
matt> kiddies. Sure, there are reasons to use Slack instead of
matt> Redhat (especially with the fscked C libraries in Redhat 7.0),
matt> but most of the twits wearing those shirts are never going to
matt> need that kid of flexibility.
The first big rifts against RH that I can remember were around the time of its IPO, which caused a lot of upset for people (very naive geeks) who had, to that point, believed all the "revolution" bullshit, and thought the idyllic, we're-going-to-crush-Wall-St stuff was really true.
I tried my best to fan the flames of their discontent, not so much to get them agitated against RH as to get them agitated against *capitalism* and to rouse them from their dogmatic, libertarian slumbers.
So I gave quotes to Andrew Leonard at Salon about my "Red Hat Wealth Monitor", a Web app that I wrote to publish on the hour the net worth of some of Red Hat's bigwigs, compared to the net worth of the average geek who got a bit of stock from RH (which was obviously only a tiny fraction of the people who'd helped build the system RH was capitalizing on).
I gave an interview on Canadian public television (which was remarkably intelligent, far better than American TV) in which I tried to explain that even if Red Hat wanted to continue to do what was best for "the community" (assuming of course that it *could* continue to do so because it had all along *been* doing so, which I didn't believe but thought a strategic concession) its owners and managers had a fiduciary trust to its *investors* and that *wasn't* "the community" but Wall Street.
I failed miserably to get anyone truly pissed off at the *system*, hindered in part by my piss-poor organizing abilities, the prevailing mushy right-libertarianism of "the community," and wankers like Eric Raymond who were mouthing the (absurdly dumb) line that 'the open source revolution will change Wall Street more than it changes us'. Hah.
Best, Kendall Clark